Good news for everyone interested in BPMN 2.0: This new screencast gives an exclusive sneak preview of the world's first tool implementation for BPMN 2.0.

Signavio closely collaborates with the Hasso-Plattner-Institute regarding the implementation. The BPMN 2.0 editor is now presented to the community in the context of the Signavio-Oryx Academic Initiative.

You will get a good first impression of the BPMN 2.0 editor through this screencast. It shows all three diagram types (conversation diagrams, choreography diagrams and process/collaboration diagrams) as well as the reuse of terms across different diagrams using the Signavio glossary functionality.

So far, the presented editor is in alpha stage. The productive version will be made available to Signavio customers later this year, including migration paths from many BPMN 1.x tools.

Signavio is the winner of the German multimedia founders competition. The team received the main prize of 25,000€ at the IFA trade fair in Berlin today. It was awarded by Dagmar Wöhrl, the Parliamentary State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology.

The founders competition selects the most promising software startups twice a year. Besides the 3 main prizes of 25,000€ each, 12 prizes of 5,000€ each were granted to young companies.

Further information about the competition (in German): www.gruenderwettbewerb.de

One of the world's largest providers of free software, Red Hat, is now collaborating with Signavio. An integrated solution for modelling and executing business processes will be provided under the name "jBPM - powered by Signavio". jBPM project lead Tom Baeyens presents the project at the Red Hat-congress JBoss World in Chicago today.

"Many software vendors promise that process models that have been defined by business analysts can be transformed into executable software 'automagically'. This vision has proved unrealistic in practice", Baeyens emphasizes. The approach taken in cooperation with the Hasso-Plattner-Institute still starts with the graphical design of process models. The technical details, however, are defined in a classical programming environment.

Signavio donates parts of its tool functionality in the context of the joint Open source project. "So far, we have only concentrated on business departments as customers. The joint solution addresses IT departments as well for the first time", Gero Decker, managing director of the Berlin-based company, remarks. In addition to the Open source solution, the existing products enable the comprehensive design and analysis of process landscapes in a collaborative way.

Academic support was provided by the Business Technology Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute, led by Prof. Mathias Weske. By integrating their modeling platform Oryx, the project is also promoted in the academic community.

The following screencast gives a good first overview of the integrated solution.

jBPM homepage: http://jbpm.org

JBoss World: http://www.jbossworld.com

Business process management has been introduced into many business administration and computer science curricula all over the world. The Signavio-Oryx Academic Initiative now offers a web-based process modeling platform to all students, lecturers and researchers that can be used free of charge and without installation effort.

"When you are teaching business process modeling, it is not sufficient to focus on the theory behind it", Prof. Mathias Weske remarks, chair of the Business Process Technology group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute and Scientific Director of Signavio. "Only by integrating practical projects into university classes, students will experience the challenging intersection of business operations and IT realization."

This is where the Signavio-Oryx Academic Initiative helps: A web-based platform for business process modeling and analysis is provided free of charge. It can be integrated into classes easily thanks to the modeling exercises that are delivered with it. In addition, researchers can develop their own prototypes based on the Open source project Oryx, which in turn can be published and evaluated on the web platform.

Leading research groups from all over the world support this initiative: The University of Stuttgart, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Queensland University of Technology from Australia, the TU Eindhoven from the Netherlands, the Stevens Institute of Technology from the US as well as the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam. Anonymized data that is created through the usage of this platform is in turn the starting point for empirical research. "That way we can explore how humans cope with graphical modeling and which difficulties typically arise", Prof. Jan Mendling from the Humboldt University explains.

The Signavio-Oryx Academic Initiative will be launched at the BPM 2009, the most important academic conference in this area, in Ulm on September 8.

Homepage: http://www.signavio.com/academic

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